Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Starting next year, Indiana is set to eliminate food stamp benefits
for tens of thousands of people who either cannot get a job, or refuse
to attend job training, the Indianapolis Star reports.

If able-bodied adults without children do not find work or
participate in a 20-hour-a-week job training program, benefits will be
strictly limited to a three-month period. Workers usually receive $131 a
month from the food stamp program.

The time limit is normally listed as a necessary condition to
receiving benefit money. Most states qualify to waive the requirement,
but although Indiana is a state that similarly qualifies, they have
decided that time-limits are a useful tool to keep around. In the rest
of the country, 28 other states are taking advantage of waiver for the
entire fiscal year, while 14 only rely on the waiver for part of the
year.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Recently I took a
trip to Washington state for the purpose of seeing a loved one before
everything goes to hell here in the United States. All things considered
it was perhaps the greatest nightmare scenario of my life as I learned a
great deal about many of the so called 'conservatives' of this nation
and how so many actively support the evil that is destroying us. I am
talking about our freedom of choice and the assault that is taking place
on it. Allow me to explain...I had planned to
spend two weeks in Washington but after five days I had taken more than I
can endure, both from the powers that be and those conservatives who
approve of the liberal left's efforts to force me to change my ways for
my own good. As mentioned I returned home prematurely and find that the
Ebola problem has grown far worse, that ISIS is growing stronger as this
nation plays a game of political posturing rather than waging war, and
that everything in general has worsened. Three
days back home and I feel the need to write of current events but
cannot engage the enemy until I address this issue that troubles me so
deeply. You see, I smoke. Started at age fourteen, and am now seventy. I
have consumed well over a million cigarettes and many thousands of fine
Brazilian cigars and loved them everyone. In fact I would go so far as
to say that I would not have lasted this long without them.This essay begins with a picture of Tom Selleck in his portrayal of General Eisenhower prior to D Day.

Pentagon unveils plan for military's response to climate change, by W. Hennigan at the Los Angeles Times ( Good Lord, what fools we have become.)

Religion of peace
- Human Rights Watch said the Islamist group "separated young women and
teenage girls from their families and has forced some of them to marry
its fighters." ... ISIS has also
beheaded a number of victims, including children, and has reportedly
buried women and children alive. In August, the Anglican Vicar of
Baghdad said ISIS jihadis cut a five-year-old Christian boy in half, and another eyewitness said a female ISIS captive was tied to cars and torn in two.Joe Newby at examiner.com

Obama's callup
- The thought of squandering the 101st Airborne, about 3,000 other
soldiers, plus the Guard, is not merely insane, it is criminally
negligent. These troops are not nurses or grave diggers! They have been
fighting a battle rigged to lose thanks to Obama's military "strategy."
And now to add insult to injury, Obama is putting them and the rest of
the military, and by extension their families and our entire country at
further direct risk of contracting and importing the disease. James Simpson at examiner.com

5 Bills in the Land of the Free that are straight out of Atlas Shrugged, by Simon Black at Sovereign Man

Mossberg
- How long will you, Mossberg & Sons, continue to ensconce
yourselves in a state where you aren't welcome, and where you've been
told that very thing by the Governor himself? We know exactly where
Malloy stand on the issues. There is nothing to see here. The
surprising thing is that Mossberg continues to take the beating. [Statement by
Joseph Bartozzi
of Mossberg] Herschel Smith at captainsjournal.com

It should be clear to all by now that federal bureaucracies are either
too corrupt, politicized, or incompetent to fulfill their core missions.
The purpose of bureaucracies is to continually expand their payroll,
budgets, and missions to the point of becoming massive, inefficient, and
deadly. We will have to take care of ourselves if we want to survive.
Waiting for more CDC directives and guidelines is worse than counterproductive.Richard Amerling, M.D., Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, at wnd.com

And here's how reliable the World Health Organization is:

In September the WHO
estimated that by October 20, there would be 3,000 total cases in
Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. As of October 7, the count was 8,376.Jonathan Last at weeklystandard.com

The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, by Natasha Geiling at Smithsonian

NTU develops ultra-fast charging batteries that last 20 years, Lester Kok at Nanyang Technological University

Signed
into law by Woodrow Wilson with four gold pens on 23 December 1913, the
President remarked that the controversial Federal Reserve “measure had
suffered many narrow escapes” before reaching his desk. Bernhard
Thuersam

The Soundest Fiat Money Ever Issued

“On
the floor of the Senate the [Federal Reserve] bill encountered heavy
opposition. Senator Elihu Root, of New York, led the attack. His
remarks were bitter and persistent. Such was Root’s standing that his
assaults attracted much attention. The vehement antagonism of Senator
Root was based on the charge that inflation and “fiat” money were at the
center of the proposed system.

“The
American people,” he argued, “closed the case for and against inflation
. . . when they sustained the vote of the inflation bill by President
Grant in 1874. Coming into power, the Democratic party undertakes to
reserve the oft-repeated judgment of the people of the united States
upon this question. We are setting our steps now in the pathway which
through the protection of a paternal government brought the mighty power
of Rome to its fall. And we are doing it here without a mandate from
the people of the United States.”

Defenders
of the bill admitted that it was true that the Federal Reserve note was
not, strictly speaking, a “Government” note, but contended that it was
quite obvious that it was not “fiat” money. On the contrary, it was a
sound bank note, secured by a forty percent gold reserve, a lien on the
issuing bank and its stock, and by the Federal Government itself. There
was little or no need for the Government obligation, it was held, but
for the sake of safety and William Jennings Bryan, it was there.

The
Senate paid little attention to the admonition of Senator Root. In
fact, it actually enlarged the inflationary features of the bill.
[They] deplored the fact that a statesman of Senator Root’s
international reputation should have seized upon a politician’s catch
phrase and denounced as “fiat” money the soundest note ever issued.”

Attorney General Eric Holder said that his biggest failure during his time as head of the Justice Department was failing to pass expanded gun control laws and criticized former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for his negative characterizations of the president during an interview aired on Monday’s broadcast of “The Lead” on CNN.

In a story that mashes together the reserved nature of Mormon
dominated Utah, with the sexualized fits of fancy you would expect from a
pin up calendar, a bit of situation has arisen in the Beehinve State.

The calendar maker, Hot Shots, filmed a promotional video of their
models during the photoshoot that took place both in the desert flats as
well has the mountain peaks of Utah. The film and subsequent calendar
utilized equipment from the Utah National Guard, both vehicles and
weaponry.
Some in the state of Utah are not happy about it and as such are
demanding an investigation into the entire situation. I’m not exactly
sure what they are looking to investigate as the video clearly shows
that the bikini clad models are firing live ammo and rolling around in
tanks and armored vehicles, not props.

According to a letter from a lawyer for the State of North Carolina to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
a speaker at a recent NAACP conference in North Carolina urged audience
members to mislead the NAACP’s own members into believing they do not
need to register to vote in advance, or that they do not need to vote at
their assigned polling place.

Why? The letter alleges: To create
confusion and animosity during the upcoming mid-term elections in North
Carolina, and to use the evidence of that confusion in the ongoing
litigation between Eric Holder’s Justice Department and North Carolina
and to show that North Carolina’s election integrity laws are
discriminatory. From the letter:

The Department of Homeland Security issued new travel restrictions Tuesday
in an effort to screen all people coming into the United States from
West Africa for Ebola symptoms. In a statement DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson
outlined new restrictions which require all flights originating from
West Africa to land at five international airports in the U.S. so
passengers can be screened.

Today, as part of the
Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing response to prevent the spread
of Ebola to the United States, we are announcing travel restrictions in
the form of additional screening and protective measures at our ports
of entry for travelers from the three West African Ebola-affected
countries. These new measures will go into effect tomorrow.

Last
week, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, DHS
implemented enhanced screening measures at five airports around the
country – New York’s JFK, Newark, Dulles, Atlanta and Chicago.Passengers
flying into one of these airports from flights originating in Liberia,
Sierra Leone and Guinea are subject to secondary screening and added
protocols, including *having their temperature taken, before they can be
admitted into the United States.

The Hagan stimulus fiasco continues to fester as the North Carolina
race enters the final stretch. Sen. Kay Hagan’s family is accused of
profiting from stimulus money that was allocated to their respective
businesses. Also, there’s the allegation that Hagan’s husband, Chip, pocketed the savings from the stimulus cash injection. Oh, and there are some possible conflict of interest issues as well. As the Carolina Journal reported today, “it’s worse than we thought:”

From a report filed early Saturday by WRAL-TV news, we have confirmation
that a cluster of businesses owned by Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan’s
husband and other family members collected even more subsidies from
taxpayers than initially reported.

Gary Cosby Jr./Decatur Daily Jack Hunter, from Athens, a veteran of 25
missions as a B17 tail gunner, stands beside the Memphis Belle Monday
during a tour and flight at Huntsville Executive Airport. The aircraft
will be open for tours and flights Saturday, October 25th at the
Huntsville Executive Airport.

Jefferson Davis
being sworn in as President of the Confederate States of America on
February 18, 1861 on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol.

Jefferson
Davis was a Unionist and struggled to his last days as a Mississippi
Senator to push Congress toward a peaceful solution to the sectional
crisis. He belonged to the Calhoun school which saw preserving the
rights of the South in the federal Union as paramount; he viewed
secession as a last resort of the States in order to preserve their
sovereignty and liberties, should the Constitution ratified voluntarily
in 1787, and its federal agent, became destructive of those rights.

“The
theory of State Rights and the belief in secession had been understood
in both sections equally, when advantage dictated understanding: as late
as 1846 the State government of Massachusetts had been willing to
secede, had passed resolutions to that end, in opposition to the Mexican
War.

The
North alone now repudiated State sovereignty because it had no interest
to serve with its support. After the Republican senators had rejected
the Crittenden Compromise, which gave to them every eventual advantage
and to the South nothing in the end, they would not listen to a proposal
of a convention of the States; they were then challenged for a
compromise proposal of their own, but not a Republican replied.

At
this distance it is certain that the deadlock exactly suited the North,
for its purpose was to subdue the South at all costs; in a policy that
conceded nothing and demanded everything, the North meant to “ride over
the South rough-shod.”

The
South was willing at this time to accept any measure that guaranteed it
even less than its Constitutional rights in the territories; but the
North no longer desired equality of sectional power; the North was bent
on domination. By refusing to budge from this position, the North forced
the South to act for its preservation, and by means of the slavery
issue the shrewdness of the Yankee succeeded, as always, of putting his
enemy in the wrong.

There
was probably not a single phase of the conflict that Mr. Davis failed,
in a sense, to understand; and yet, in the end, he could not see why men
would not follow the law, or why the inflamed sections would not abide
by compromises. Men sometimes act reasonably, but never logically; this
was a distinction that Mr. Davis, being logical, could not grasp.

[After
his final speech and resignation from the United States Senate after
Mississippi had seceded, Davis] painfully moved through the crowded
Senate chamber out into the street, [and for him] the old Constitutional
republic came . . . to a dramatic end. There would no longer be a Union
in the exact sense of that word; there would be a uniformity; for one
of the two types of American civilization must absolutely prevail.
Davis left the Senate smaller; it would never be so large again; he was
the last of the Senate giants.

All the night of January 21
he suffered, sleepless; the nervous strain of the last six months had
broken him down. His neuralgia had spread film over one iris; he was
almost blind in that eye. Mrs. Davis, anxious in the next room, heard
him say, again and again, in a tone of agony:

“May God have us in His Holy keeping, and grant that before it is too late peaceful councils may prevail.”

Landing at Baton Rouge on 8 October 14, a pilot of a vintage taildragger locked up his brakes and dropped his nose expensively
into the tarmac of Runway 13. Hey, it happens. But this time, it wasn’t
a Cub or Taylorcraft doing a nose stand, but a multi-million dollar
Focke-Wulf 190, one of a handful of airworthy examples of the Germans’
second most numerous WWII fighter.

Remembrance

Winners: Navy Cross Nguyen Van Kiet & MOH Thomas R. Norris This week’s Medal of Honor hero is one of a handful of Navy SEALs awarded the MOH in the Vietnam War. Norris snuck behind enemy lines with a South Vietnamese Navy petty officer rescued two downed pilots in 1972–when most of our resources had been pulled from the country. Interesting to note that later year, Norris was himself rescued by another SEAL Michael E. Thornton.More @ Medal of Honor Roll Call

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Core Creek Militia

==============================My sixth great grandfather, his wife, and five of his six children were killed in battle with the Tuscarora Indians at Core Creek, NC.

The Seven Blackbirds

==============================My third great grandfather was an Ensign in the Revolutionary War, and saved his unit's flag after being wounded at the Battle of Brandywine. He was also at Kingston (Kinston), Wilmington, Charleston, Two Sisters and Augusta. He was at the defeat at Brier Creek and also Bee Creek.

Requiem Aeternam -
Eternal Rest Grant unto Them
==============================
My second great grandfather was killed in action on May 3, 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
=============================
My great grandfather and great uncle knew all the men in the "Civil War Requiem" video as they were part of the 53rd NC which was the sole unit defending Fort Mahone. (Fort Mahone was named "Fort Damnation" by the Yankees) *Handpicked men of the 53rd (My great grandfather was one of these) made the final, night assault at Petersburg in an attempt to break Grant's line. This was against Fort Stedman which was a few miles to the slight northeast. They initially succeeded, but reinforcements drove them back. This video is made from photographs which were taken the day after the 53rd evacuated the lines the night before to begin the retreat to Appomattox. I have many more pictures taken by the same photographer, one of these shows a 14 year old boy and the other is the famous picture of the blond, handsome soldier with his musket.
===========================
*General Gordon promised the men a gold medal and 30 days leave if they accomplished their task and many years after the War my great grandfather wrote General Gordon, who was then governor of Georgia about this incident. They exchanged several letters which I have framed. See first link below.
===========================
*The Attack On Fort Stedman
============================
"His Colored Friends"
============================
Lee's Surrender
=============================
My Black NC Kinfolks
============================
Punished For Being Caught!

Great Grandfather Koonce

He was a drummer boy in the WBTS, survived the War only to die a few years later. He was caught in an ice storm on his way home, but instead of seeking shelter, continued on his horse until the end. His clothes had to be cut off and he died a few days later.